Arts Plus. Theater.

Sexual Perversity Revisited

Duo Plays 4 People Tangled In A Web Of Deceit, Seduction

"Quartet," by the German playwright Heiner Muller, is an even more perverse presentation of sexual corruption than the notorious "Les Liaisons Dangereuses," on which it is based.

More familiar these days in its 1988 film adaptation as "Dangerous Liaisons," Choderlos de Laclos' novel of 1782 tells of a wicked game of seduction, played for malicious sport by the Marquise de Mertreuil and the Vicomte de Valmont, in which Valmont violates both a virtuous wife and a young virgin fresh out of the convent.

That is essentially the same story that Muller's intermissionless drama, written in 1982, relates; but-with the cryptic notation that the play's "Timespace" is a "Drawing room before the French Revolution. Air raid shelter after World War III"-he has the Marquise and Valmont act out all the roles of the drama in a graphic, bitter contest of love and death.

In addition to playing themselves, the two principals play each other and Valmont's female conquests. Thus, Valmont, the seducer in one scene, later switches gender to portray the object of his seduction, and the Marquise, in addition to acting out the role of the virgin, takes a final, deadly stab at playing Valmont.

As they slash out at each other with rage and self-loathing in this dark charade, the Marquise and Valmont also act out very explicit simulations of oral and anal sex, not to mention foot fetishism.

The effect is to further heighten the already intense sexual tension and to make the dance of seduction even more deadly and violent.

At Center Theater, where Muller's play is having its Chicago premiere under Dan LaMorte's direction as part of the theater's ongoing German Plays Project, this savage power struggle is played out by Robin Witt, as the Marquise, and Marc Vann, as Valmont, within a small, spare 18th Century drawing room designed by Geoffrey M. Curley.

Neither actor is quite up to the play's elegant language (in an English translation by Carl Weber); but Witt, broad-shouldered and big-bosomed in her tight corset, is a strong, desperate presence as the marauding Marquise, and Vann, besides showing a smoothly toned torso in his nude scene, is truly remarkable in conveying both male crudity and feminine delicacy in his performance.